Sep212007

Microsoft Office 2008 User Experience

With each release of Office we are offered the opportunity to introduce feature improvements and exciting new innovations. One area that I am really excited about is our next generation Office 2008 User Experience. For those already familiar with existing Office for Mac, you will find yourself at home — you will still find the familiar toolbars and drop-down menus, only that they’ve been further evolved to reflect the latest UI trends on the Mac platform. At the same time, you will also discover entirely new suite-wide user interface elements that again, have been designed from the ground up to reflect the visual and behavioral qualities unique to the Mac.

As the User Experience Lead Program Manager, I am excited about many aspects of the new Office 2008 UI and look forward to sharing our design philosophy, goals, and processes. For those familiar with many excellent blogs from elsewhere in the company, my role is similar to Jensen Harris on the Office for Windows team – and I look forward to discussing our UI in a similar level of breath and depth through future blog posts. Also, I will be providing screenshots of the product — so when you see a link, click away!

There is much to talk about but today I will start with our most noticeable new addition to Office 2008 — the Elements Gallery. In this post, I will also touch upon other new user interface feature improvements, many of which are “coming attractions

Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.